Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, page 29
Having taken Hewson’s affidavit Paul Temm then handed it to the man the Thomas family had chosen to replace him, Kevin Ryan.
By now the Hunt Ball was in full swing. The tabloid press of New Zealand, sensing a growing undercurrent of unease at the verdict amongst the public, came to the party with a vengeance. Truth newspaper 29.6.71:
VIV’S FIGHTING FOR HER MAN
‘HE’S INNOCENT’
‘I EVEN MADE TEA FOR THE POLICE’
The Sunday Times 20.6.71:
BLOOD-SOAKED FARMHOUSE:
CYCLE OF A DOUBLE SLAYING.
ARTHUR WAS ‘GOOD BLOKE’
CARTRIDGE CASE A KEY
The Sunday News 25.7.71:
‘LAY OFF OR BE KILLED’
This one referred to death threats that had been made to a private detective firm who were considering making further investigations into what the Sunday News called ‘the slaying’ of the Pukekawa farm couple Harvey and Jeannette Crewe.
The fight that that unknown farmer from Pukekawa had offered Bruce Hutton in the foyer of the Supreme Court was now reaching national proportions. Truth newspaper showed in particular a total commitment to the argument that there should be a retrial. It told its readers on 17 August 1971: ‘Truth will continue to inquire into the Thomas affair until it feels that justice has been served.’ Various aspects of evidence that appeared unresolved were seized on by Truth and other newspapers. Headlines screamed: ‘THOMAS: GOLD WATCH RIDDLE’ and ‘GUNS NEGLECTED’ and ‘POLICE IGNORING THOMAS MURDER MUDDLE’.
A retrial committee was formed, headed by Vivien Thomas’s uncle, Pat Vesey. He had made a brief appearance during the first trial, testifying on behalf of Arthur Thomas that there was a profusion of used .22 cartridge shells lying around the farm, the premise being that anyone could have picked one up and dropped it into a Crewe flowerbed. He little realized when he formed that retrial committee in July 1971, the years of frustration that lay ahead for him and the other committee members.
Members of the public began sending cash donations to the retrial committee. Quite suddenly the name of Arthur Thomas was on everyone’s lips. While he remained locked in a maximum security prison the debate raged in clubs, pubs, offices, from Whangarei and Auckland in the north to Christchurch and Dunedin in the south. Nowhere was there greater debate and argument than in the small settlement where it had all begun, Pukekawa.
Pukekawa’s division burst out into the open. Those who supported the verdict, including some who had been witnesses for the Crown like the jeweller Eggleton and the poultry farmer Priest complained of intimidation and harassment. Eggleton, it was alleged, had actually been subjected to bodily threats unless he changed his testimony. Owen Priest talked to the press of cars that drove slowly past his farm, stopped, then accelerated away. To combat the retrial committee, another emerged. It included farmers Ian Spratt and Priest. They were convinced the verdict was just and asked the press to approach the issue objectively. Both groups denied there was a vendetta. Both groups denied they were harassing the other. Shots were fired up Ian Spratt’s driveway. Other shots were fired at the home of Ted Smith. Julie Priest complained that she was being followed when shopping in nearby Pukekohe.
Inspector Hutton and some of his men moved back into the area. Hutton defended the case that the police had assembled against Thomas. He also said he intended to give the Crown witnesses full protection. Regarding protection for people like Ted Smith and his wife and children he made no statement. He said that the identities of a number of the culprits were known, yet strangely there were no arrests. While a French medium offered his services, an Auckland medium instructed the supporters of Thomas to look in the bush on Len Demler’s property for a rifle.
The very frightening aspect for the citizens of Pukekawa, who significantly locked their doors at night, took on elements of farce when the Sunday Times on 8 August published a photograph of a smartly dressed gentleman crouched and peering through fieldglasses over open countryside. The caption underneath read: ‘One of the persons observed by the police on the Demler property and suspected of harassing Crown witnesses from the murder trial.’ As the circulation battle hotted up Truth gleefully reproduced the photograph the following week plus the confirmation they had obtained from Bruce Hutton that the man in the photograph was in fact a policeman.
Old-age pensioners, young children and wealthier people sent their cents and dollars to the retrial committee; and Detective Inspector Hutton told the press that the file on who fed baby Rochelle was not closed. He added:
‘The child was obviously fed during the time between the killings and when she was found.’
The New Zealand Weekly News published a double-page spread entitled: VIVIEN THOMAS: ‘MY HUSBAND IS INNOCENT’.
Petitions headed ‘LET RIGHT BE DONE’ came out of Waiheke.
Other papers cited the Mareo case as justification that a convicted murderer could obtain a second trial.
Television crews, radio teams, newspaper reporters and most of all sightseers roamed through the lanes of Pukekawa.
More official petitions were distributed by members of the retrial committee.
While all this furore and much more was exploding, life, normal, sometimes dreary, everyday life had to be lived. The cows on the Thomas farm, singularly unimpressed that the woman who tended them, had become overnight a personality, demanded to be milked. With the aid of sister-in-law Lyrice and brothers-in-law Lloyd and Desmond Vivien Thomas, in between posing at the farm gate for a magazine, or on a tractor for a newspaper, got on with the essential job of running the farm. There was also the routine of the weekly visits to Paremoremo prison. While some members of Pukekawa attempted to establish the innocence or guilt of Thomas with the aid of fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, spinning glasses and ouija boards, the two people who knew the truth met in what Governor Hobson described to me as ‘the end of the road, for any prisoner’.
When the retrial committee tested rifles, but would not tell the press why, when they dug up the Thomas farm tip and declined to say what they were digging for, one man at least knew – Inspector Bruce Hutton. He had an excellent intelligence service operating in Pukekawa. As fast as the retrial committee came up with an idea, Hutton moved to combat it. In case any reader wonders how I know this, the ex-inspector told me.
Clearly it was open invitation to this particular Hunt Ball. A great many people were running around in ever decreasing circles in the hunt for ‘the real murderer’ or ‘the mystery woman’. Yet, in truth no real hunt for either person was ever undertaken. The retrial committee was totally concerned with destroying the case that had been built against Thomas. If the same amount of energy, time and effort had gone into establishing exactly who had killed the Crewes I believe Thomas would have been released from prison years ago, with a full pardon.
When the Sunday News attempted to interview members of the jury they were promptly threatened with legal action by Solicitor-General R. C. Savage, QC. He effectively gagged them.
The press gag by the Solicitor-General is a clear indication that the pressure was beginning to bite. The newspapers that had taken up the issue had many readers. People who read newspapers also vote.
Attacking its rival in the Thomas stakes, Truth called the action of the Sunday News irresponsible and backed the Solicitor-General. Clearly the very important issue of press censorship did not occur to the then editor of Truth.
Internal newspaper politics aside, the popular press kept up an unremitting campaign on behalf of Thomas. It was by late 1971 the most controversial murder case in the history of New Zealand.
In August 1971, Vivien Thomas had finally told her parents in Farnham, Surrey, that their son-in-law had been convicted of a brutal double murder. In the same month yet another television team came to Pukekawa. The group interviewed were either members of the retrial committee or people who believed in the innocence of Arthur Thomas. Amongst them was Margaret Smith. She talked on television of the effect the whole case was having on the children in the district, how it was discussed in the schools. This drew upon her the ire of at least one local headmaster who insisted that none of his schoolchildren discussed the affair. Palpable nonsense. It was not only discussed – it became part of the school curriculum. One end-of-term exam at Onewhero secondary school had as the subject of its comprehension test: ‘Arthur’s dump’. In the same English paper the pupils were asked to write an essay; among the subjects they could choose from were ‘Prison: Punishment or Reform?’ ‘The Power Of The Press’ and ‘Capital Punishment’.
In September 1971, the flowering ex-typist from Farnham spoke at a lunchtime forum to the students of Auckland University; also speaking were Pat Vesey and the man who so long ago had insisted that Thomas get a lawyer, farmer Brian Murray.
The pressure was mounting, the screw tightening. Trajectory tests that illustrated the improbability of a cartridge case flying backwards nearly sixteen feet tightened it just a little bit more. Friction between members of the retrial committee on the best way to proceed loosened it again.
There was further friction on the Thomas farm between Vivien and the members of the Thomas family who were helping her, though this was not made public. There was further friction in the home of many in Pukekawa. The strain was beginning to tell. Margaret Smith’s relations, for example, were critical of the fact that she appeared to be spending more time collecting signatures on petition forms than she did looking after her children. What primarily mattered to both of these women, Margaret and Vivien, was ‘the cause’. They and many others were determined that there should be a retrial, that justice should finally be seen to be done. By October over 20,000 signatures had been collected on the petition forms.
While Truth attacked the Sunday Times for being first critical and then capitalizing on the Thomas case, and a former member of the retrial committee attempted to bring a private prosecution against three Crown witnesses, alleging perjury, the people of New Zealand kept on signing petition forms.
As Sunday News columnist Odette Leather rightly observed in an article published on 12 September: ‘The trial of Arthur Thomas has ended but in its stead a strange new trial has begun. The defendant in this instance is “the system”.’
Even more pertinently she observed: ‘Allegations quite serious in their implications have been made but the defendant remains silent.’
In mid-November a petition asking for a retrial for Arthur Thomas was presented to the then Governor-General Sir Arthur Porritt. With the petition went 22,000 signatures, all collected by a handful of people within the space of a few months. Also with the petition went the reasons why a second trial was being asked for. They took the form of a number of sworn affidavits, There were a considerable number, but clearly the most important was that from Graham Hewson.
While the Executive Council pondered, articles and stories on the case continued to stream from the presses. One that should take a Pulitzer Prize for the most ridiculous heading read: THE GUILTLESSNESS OF ARTHUR THOMAS. AN OBJECTIVE APPRAISAL by Stephen Chan. The article was as ‘objective’ as the heading.
On 19 December Acting Minister of Justice David Thomson announced that the case would be reviewed by former Supreme Court Judge, Sir George McGregor. It was an unusual step to take. Section 406 of the Crimes Act 1961 – and it was under the provisions of this Act that a retrial was being asked for – gives the Governor-General several alternatives, but with an application like that of Thomas these were reduced to one: refer the matter to the Appeal Court. Sir George, as a retired Judge, was not a member of any court. It should have given the retrial committee and Thomas’s supporters a whiff of what was to come. It didn’t.
Sir George gathered around him the trial transcripts and the Appeal Court records and withdrew to his Wellington home.
Over a year had passed since that moment when Detective Mike Charles had remarked to Vivien Thomas: ‘I admire your loyalty.’ It had been a twelve months that few can imagine for the quiet, rather prim girl from England. She had become the focal point of the entire campaign mounted on behalf of her husband. She had been subjected to publicity on a scale that is very difficult to comprehend. From the quiet obscurity of a small farm, she had had press and television cameras thrust in her face, her every thought and word recorded. She had watched powerless as her marriage was broken irretrievably. She had been accused in the most clear terms by the Crown Prosecutor of being an accomplice to murder. There had been letters of support but there had been the other kind, always anonymous, of course, saying: ‘You should be serving life too, you bitch.’ And: ‘Get out of our country, you Pommy bastard.’ The vivacity shown to the Auckland students masked the reality of the mud and cowshit of her everyday life. She had coped with the strictures from her husband on visiting days about how she should be running the farm; had coped as best she could with the icy silences that so often greeted her in the Pukekawa store. She had a thousand friends but no-one to hold in bed through the long nights. By December 1971 she was taking at her doctor’s instructions sleeping pills and tranquillizers. By January 1972, she took a lover.
‘I was not looking consciously for anybody or anything. It was just a situation that evolved. I think in that three-month period before I went to England that I contemplated marrying … in a silly sort of way. Probably because I knew when I left that farm in May 1972, that it was the end of my marriage.’
The brief affair was the beginning of many years of moral blackmail for Vivien Thomas. She wanted to state publicly that her marriage was over, that she desired to seek a new life. Always there were people to say: ‘Remember Arthur. Think of the Cause. It will damage our work. You know how people think, they’ll assume he must be guilty.’ Vivien Thomas was beginning to find by early 1972 that there is more than one form of prison. Strange the way so many of us equate immorality with criminality.
On 17 February Sir George McGregor’s conclusions were known. Not to Arthur Thomas or his wife Vivien. Not to Pat Vesey or Mr Thomas senior, in whose names the petition had been presented. Not even to the legal representatives of the committee. The first people to be told were the news media. Vivien Thomas’s first information about the report was obtained from the radio.
The report itself was as inept as the manner in which it had been made public. It was a disaster and was considered to be so by people on both sides of the Thomas case. One quote should suffice here to illustrate that Sir George, the retired judge, should have stayed retired:
‘The expert evidence in effect decides that the shooting was done with the accused’s rifle.’
I am aware that Sir George McGregor is now dead. Like Voltaire I believe we owe the dead nothing but the truth. His report was riddled with inaccuracies like the one just quoted. We once had a man in Great Britain who produced on behalf of the then government a very similar report on a murder case. In this man’s mind, justice had most certainly not miscarried in the case he had been asked to study. The man’s name was Scott-Henderson. The case he was studying was that of Timothy Evans. A number of years after that report Evans was granted a posthumous pardon.
When Sir George’s findings were made public and his conclusion that with regard to the Thomas case ‘there had been no miscarriage of justice’, it was considered a shattering blow to the retrial committee. It was nothing of the sort. It was the most perfect ammunition on which to mount a major campaign.
The then Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, the late Sir Roy Jack, expressed his delight with the report. ‘Justice had been done,’ he told the nation. ‘We have been fortunate in having the benefit of a very careful and thorough examination of all the papers made by the Hon. Sir George McGregor, a recently retired Supreme Court Judge.’ Sir Roy felt that McGregor had been the ‘ideal person’ for such a task. His homily concluded with:
‘The decision of the Governor-General in council has been taken after consideration of Sir George’s report, and I hope that the public will share my confidence that justice has been done in this case and are now prepared to accept the verdict and the decision of the Court of Appeal.’
It was a vain hope. He knew the legal system itself was on trial.
The retrial committee, newspapers like Truth and Sunday News, all made it quite plain that they did not believe that justice had been done.
Aspects of the report were torn apart. It was, for example, pointed out that Sir George had, when considering the information laid before him that clearly established the fact that Arthur Thomas did not own and never had owned a gold watch, accepted that evidence and dismissed Eggleton from the proceedings with: ‘I am not impressed with the evidence of Eggleton … It would seem to me that Eggleton was mistaken. I think this doubtful evidence would not have influenced the jury in its decision.’ Sir George had justified his ability to read the minds of the twelve jurors by pointing out that neither judge nor counsel had referred to Eggleton’s evidence in their final speeches. As has already been shown, both counsel referred specifically to Eggleton’s evidence.
While impassioned pleas that their son was innocent were being made by his parents, people totally unconnected with the family or the retrial syndrome were also expressing private doubts. Among them was the Labour party’s spokesman on justice, Dr Martyn Finlay. Then in opposition, he was widely tipped as the Minister of Justice if Labour came to power at the next general election. When I interviewed him he recalled that period for me in the Thomas saga:
‘Immediately the first trial was over I was uneasy about it. I obtained the notes of evidence and the judge’s summing-up from Paul Temm and read them through with some care. The theory of the louvre shooting worried me. From this very unsteady and strained position he had to shoot with the absolute requirement that the shot be fatal. That seemed to me to be stretching a possibility to breaking point. That was the first flaw I saw in the Crown’s case. Logic pointed to the murders having been committed inside the house.’
